News of the week

Crypto: a Kurt Russell Movie

A Hollywood movie about crypto-world is moving to post-production and set to release in 2019. According to producers, the movie will tell a touching story about shady cryptocurrency dealings with corruption and fraud involved, but in the end, will create a positive idea. Legendary Kurt Russell will play a role of a father of a money laundering agent, who will be investigating some illegal business with cryptocurrencies. Producers warn that die-hard crypto-enthusiasts won’t find a specific coin or any other details in the movie, but outside viewer may see something new.

NVIDIA has reported a significant drop in revenue as the mining industry slows. The company’s Q2 report announced the decline in sales. According to NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress, it wasn’t a great surprise, but the company was expecting a smaller dip. Manufacturer compensated the decline in crypto mining in other industries such as gaming, datacenter, and professional visualization sectors. A group of analysts is confident that company’s revenue from other sectors will continue to grow while mining sales will be declining further.

Cryptocurrencies are still something suspicious and illegal to some authorities. While Bitcoin is widely known, it still creates tension in customs and airports between security and crypto enthusiasts. Security expert Matt Mitchell gives the advice to cover up the stickers, T-Shirts, and laptops in public places and border crossings. The social advertisements may “get you targeted for opposition research, industrial espionage, legal or investigative scrutiny.” Some crypto enthusiasts give weird stories when they were pulled out by authorities to investigate how much cryptocurrencies they have on themselves as it is a physical thing.

A major bank in Canada with pension fund investor Ontario Teachers’ is testing blockchain technology. BMO created the system with open source blockchain infrastructure to create an opportunity for a buyer to view the transaction and verify the accuracy of the term sheet information and payment amounts until maturity of the fixed income security. It is intended to enable cost reduction in compliance, financial reporting, security clearing and settlement of cash transactions.

Bank of China and financial services corporation China UnionPay will explore blockchain technology applications for payment system development. The companies are expecting to improve mobile banking products by investigating big data and distributed ledger technology deployment. UnionPay wants to build a unified port for mobile integrated financial services, where cardholders will be able to use a QR code to spend, transfer and trade on a cloud flash payment app.